Hollande and Merkel: Odd Couple or Soulmates?

Frenchmen stormed the Bastille the night Socialist François Hollande was elected president of France. Celebrating victory with fireworks and red flares in Paris’s Place de la Bastille—the ignition point of the French Revolution in 1789—seemed appropriate given Hollande’s attention-getting platform. During his campaign, Hollande promised to raise the top income tax rate to 75 percent, impose a levy on financial transactions, raise public spending, roll back an increase in the retirement age, and stand up to German Chancellor Angela Merkel by getting Europe to focus more on growth and less on austerity. “Thank you, people of France,” Hollande told the roaring crowd in the wee hours of May 7. “I am president of the youth of France … I am president of justice in France.”

But Hollande, 57, who will be inaugurated on May 15, is far from a Jacobin revolutionary. He’s a mild-mannered technocrat who was trained for the civil service at the elite École Nationale d’Administration. He’s likely to move slowly on the populist promises he made during the campaign and govern from the center, judging from his history and the predictions of his more middle-of-the-road supporters.